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ple and family bonds, which was the kind of story he was most often drawn to. Young employs a wide variety of sources, many of which are cited in the extensive notes section located at the back of the book. They include a range of academic and general writings, alongside stars’ biographies and autobiographies, and information obtained through personal correspondence, for example, her interviews with actor Gene Reynolds (now aged 96) and actress Marsha Hunt (currently 101 years old). Young has also undertaken extensive archival research, including consulting the MGM Collection at the University of Southern California and the Brown Collection at the University of Tennessee. The latter, she notes in the book’s final chapter, consists of papers and personal items donated by the director upon his retirement from filmmaking. While Young’s book is academically sound and is backed up by an extensive range of sources, it also has the ability to appeal to a much wider audience who may be interested in not only the director but in Hollywood cinema and filmmaking more generally. This comes across perhaps most obviously through the distinct lack of technical jargon used by the author, thus invoking a universal appeal. What she has produced is a weighty volume that not only tells the story of the life and career of one of MGM’s, and Hollywood’s, most productive and consistently successful film directors, but it simultaneously details the wider story of the studio system, the star system, battles with the censors, the challenges of location shooting and the advancing technology of cinematic apparatus as film transitioned from silence to sound.